ALF HILTEBEITEL

  MORE RETHINKING THE MAHABHARATA: TOWARD A POLITICS OF BHAKTI

Appreciative of the attention my 2001 book Rethinking the Mahbhrata1 (henceforth Rethinking) has received from the a a learned scrutiny of colleagues in recent reviews,2 and mindful of my long and fruitful exchange with most of the colleagues in question, I would like, while attentive to helpful criticisms, to respond to them in the context of my ongoing and especially most recent work for which Rethinking will, I hope, serve in the not to distant future as a precursor to a book that I am planning under the provisional title of Mapping the Sanskrit Epics: Poetry, Dharma, and Devotion (henceforth Mapping).3 This projected book will draw together

Alf Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahbhrata: A Readers Guide to the Educaa a tion of the Dharma King (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). I thank my friends and colleagues Jonathan Chaves and Randy Kloetzli for helpful rst readings of this essay, and also Wendy Doniger, James Fitzgerald, and Luis GonzalesReimann for helpful critiques oered in presentations and discussions at a panel on Rethinking at the 32nd Annual South Asia Conference, Madison WI, October 2003 where a second draft was presented with only the rst part of the title. It is this panel that put the idea for the subtitle in motion. 2 I will respond to the following: Mary Brockington, review of Rethinking, Indo-Iranian Journal 45 (2002); John Brockington, review of Rethinking, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65,3 (2002), 601; Peter Schreiner, review of Rethinking, Journal of Religion 83,2 (2003), 323; and James L. Fitzgerald, The Many Voices of the Mahbhrata: An Article Reviewing Rethinking the a a Mahbhrata: A Readers Guide to the Education of the Dharma King by Alf Hila a tebeitel, to appear in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, henceforth Many Voices, citations of which are made of a pre-print draft of March 2003. Fitzgeralds article is now to be found in Journal of the American Oriental Society 123,4: 80318. See also Naina Dayal, The Cooking Time (review of Rethinking), The Book Review (Delhi), January 2004: 89. 3 I note with appreciation Schreiners comment, in his review of Rethinking, 332, that in a guidebook one expects more maps and clearer sign posts.

Indo-Iranian Journal 47: 203227, 2004. DOI: 10.1007/s10783-005-1679-z

* Springer 2005

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work done since the completion of Rethinking. It has begun taking form in conference presentations, several referenced in this essay, at venues where I have been able to continue to work out my views in dialogue with colleagues most notably James L. Fitzgerald, who has been co-empanelled with me at all these venues, and whose review of Rethinking will be foregrounded in this essay. Near the beginning of his discussion of Rethinking, Fitzgerald mentions two matters that he takes to characterize my work from 1976 to 2001.4 I am said to be [a] consistent advocate of the intentional unity of the MBh (more or less the Pune text) and, especially, a erce defender of the importance of the divine Krsn a and Krsn a-bhakti :: : :: : in that text.5 On bhakti, briey (for the moment): yes. But on intentional unity I would like to set matters in the context of my developing ideas. It is only since 1992 that I would own up to being an advocate of the intentional unity of the Mbh,6 and thus I am not a consistent advocate of that position. My 1976 book, The Ritual of Battle, carried arguments that archaic elements of the Mbh were drawn from Indo-European myth, ritual, and epic, and that growths and interpolations occurred around such an archaic epic core. Indeed, it was my burden in that book to argue that Krsn as anities with Visn u (in :: : :: the epics incarnational avat ra7 scheme) had Brahmanical, Vedic, a para-Vedic, and Indo-European roots that implied pre-epic growths, and were thus not among the things requiring interpolation theory or the alleged lateness of Krsn a-bhakti to explain them. I would no :: : longer make such a developmental argument to account for these
That is, from my The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahbhrata (Ithaca: a a Cornell University Press, 1976; Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990) to Rethinking. 5 Fitzgerald, Many Voices ms., 1. 6 These words are taken from an e-mail exchange with Fitzgerald of March 5, 2003, the rst of several over his review. I was deliberately misquoting his abbreviation MBh. As I point out in Rethinking, 108, the abbreviation Mbh is preferable to MBh since there is no evidence for a prior Bh outside the secondary literature. 7 As has been long and widely recognized, and will be discussed further below, the avat concept is under formation in the Mbh without yet being used as a ara substantive. See Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 109 n. 56 a note overlooked even though it is back-referenced in a note on page 236 n. 36, a page that John Brockington cites to criticize one of my approaches to this topic as implausible on the sole stated grounds that I show no recognition of the fact that the term [avatra] is a later than the epics; see J. Brockingtons review of Rethinking, 601.
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associations. I would approach them from the standpoint of what dawned on me in 1992 that the Mahbhrata is a work of literature a a involving writing. My epiphany as to the written literary character of the Mbh owed a good deal to prior points made by Fitzgerald,8 who has since claried how he regards the text to have undergone two written recensions: one, the redaction of a main Mahbhrata9 that would a a have been completed through a deliberate authorial and redactorial eort sometime during or shortly after the times of the Brahman a: dynasties of the Sungas and the K n vas; that is, after the middle of the second century B.C. and before the end of the rst century B.C., though perhaps even as late as the rst century A.D.; and second, a Gupta text destined to become the normative redaction that would have been created and promulgated at some point around the time of the Gupta Empire (320 497 A.D.).10 I nd the notion of a second redaction gratuitous and ungainly and the notion of royal support for the epics production and dissemination unnecessary. In my current work on the Nryan a a : ya, I attempt to show that the Guptas do not help us to account for anything in the Critical Edition of the Mbh that cannot be accounted for well before their time; and I maintain this point especially with regard to bhakti segments, elements, and themes, for which pre-Gupta (not to mention pre-Common Era) iconographical and para-epic textual evidence is surprisingly ample. Moreover, I draw on the inspired work of T.P.

See James L. Fitzgerald, The Moksa Anthology of the Great Bhrata: An Initial a : Survey of Structural Issues, Themes, and Rhetorical Strategies, PhD dissertation (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1980), 5657, 62, 190; idem, Indias Fifth Veda: The Mahbhratas Presentation of Itself, in Arvind Sharma, ed., Essays on the a a Mahbhrata (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 15258, especially 153 n. 5 both as cited in a a Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 24 n. 97. 9 Many Voices ms., 10. Fitzgerald grants in a footnote (idem, 10 n. 34) that main Mahbhrata is a vague expression. He would seem to have coined it, a a in preference to the often-used main story, as one that admits to a text and is thus quite dierent from the main story. Schreiner, review of Rethinking, 332, notes my usage of main story as integrated. . . with whatever is other than main (Hiltebeitel speaks of inner and outer). It could be clearer in his point that the latter usages refer to frame stories. 10 James L. Fitzgerald, Making Yudhisthira the King: The Dialectics and the Poli:: tics of Violence in the Mahbhrata, Rocznik Orientalistyczny 54, 1 (2001), 68. a a

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Mahadevan11 to argue that, based on the correspondence between a Kas m -S rad and Malay lam manuscripts of the Mbh and the r a a likelihood that the latter were brought south by P rvas ikha Brahu mans before the Gupta Dynasty, the Guptas cannot be responsible for the dissemination of any normative redaction of the epic. Nonetheless, what remains of interest is that Fitzgerald argues for the writtenness not only of the normative Gupta redaction but of the main Mahbhrata that supposedly preceded it. Calling a a his arguments impressionistic rather than demonstrable, he oers two basic reasons in favor of the writtenness of this Ur-text: I think the intricacy of the narrative would have been easier to develop with writing, and some of the highly rened elements of the text, such as the perfectly regular classical meters, suggest the likelihood of writing being used in their development.12 Tentative as they are, I welcome these additional arguments for the written character of what Fitzgerald considers the earliest Mbh text. But the clearest evidence for writing would come not from this main Mahbhrata, on which more in a a a moment, but from the enlarged Gupta text, where a denite reference to writing and likely allusions to books can be found in didactic material and in connection with the Mahbhratas three interwoven a a frame stories: the outermost authorial frame in which Vy sa recites a uka; the inner generthe Mbh to his ve disciples, including his son S ational frame in which the P n davas great grandson Janamejaya pera: : forms the snake sacrice at which he (along with Vy sa and Suka) a hears the Mbh from Vais amp yana, one of the four initial disciples to a have learned it from Vy sa in the rst place; and the outer cosmoa logical frame in which the Rsis of the Naimisa Forest hear the Mbh :: : from the bard Ugras ravas who had also heard it at Janamejayas snake sacrice. It is thus likely that Mbh 1.1.208, from the outer frame (the last of the three in the epics sequencing of their delivery), alludes to written volumes when Ugras ravas says that the Mahbhrata a a weighs more on a scale than the four Vedas.13 Likewise at 12.335.21-

11 T. P. Mahadevan, Brahmans and the Sanskrit Epics: Their Migrations to the South, paper presented to the University Seminar on South Asia, The George Washington University, January 16, 2003, which derived from his work in progress, The Arrival of Vedism in South India: The Aparasikha and Prvasikha Brahu mans (tentative title). 12 Fitzgerald, Many Voices ms., p. 14. 13 See further 1.1.16-19 as translated and discussed in Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 100.

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66, in the Nryan a a : ya, it would seem that something bookishly hefty is at hand when the asuras Madhu and Kaitabha steal the : Vedas from Brahm and try to throw them into hell (12.335.21a 66). And writing itself is explicitly mentioned at 13.24.70 where Bhsma tells Yudhisthira, Sellers of the Vedas, corrupters of the : :: Vedas, and those who write the Vedas, these surely go to hell.14 Is this distribution simply an indication that the Mahbhrata, by a a Fitzgeralds account (as well as mine) a written work from the start, is more prone to refer to books and writing outside of its rst writing (that is, outside the main Mahbhrata) than in it? a a Does it tactically avoid reference to writing in the main story because it is a story of older times, or Vedic times? Or does it become more explicit about books and writing with time? And if so, over what kind of time? Yet reference to writing and books cannot be all there is to the intentional literary unity of such a text one that, with its literary experiments such as frame stories, long didactic interludes, and many subtales, might, let us note, intend more unity than it achieves, at least by any conventional standard. In my study of the Nryan that will be central to Mapping,15 I argue that this a a : ya proverbially late devotional text maps movements between the Mahbhratas three frames, and that this feature of the Nryan a a a a : ya allows one to discern how the three frames work throughout the Mbh as a whole. For Fitzgerald, however, the main Mah bh rata a a is composed before this entanglement of frames: it includes only the basic Vais amp yana frame with its am svatarana listing, that is, a : a : only part of the inner Vais amp yana frame itself, and the other a two frames not at all. This main Mahbhrata, says Fitzgerald, is a a

14 I discuss these passages in Hiltebeitel, Weighting Orality and Writing in the Sanskrit Epics, presented August 2002 and to appear in Petteri Koskikallio, ed., Proceedings of the Third Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Pur : as (DISCEP). Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts; an and further in Hiltebeitel, Buddhism and the Mah arata, prepared for Profesabh sor Frits Staals class on Buddhism at the University of Leiden, November 2003, and now for Federico Squarcini, ed., Boundaries, Dynamics and Construction of Traditions in South Asia (Florence, forthcoming). 15 Alf Hiltebeitel, The Nryan a a : ya: Ongoing Problems in Dating the Sanskrit Epics, presented at the Between the Empires conference, University of Texas, Austin, April 2003.

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concerned to provide ideological and narrative grounding for a Brahminical conception of kingly rule and hierarchical society in the wake of the Mauryan Empire and that governments cosmopolitanism and its insucient recognition of the uniqueness of Brahminic authority.16 More revealing than what Fitzgerald includes in this main Mahbhrata is his list of what probably came later: a a [m]ost of the material in Bh : mas instructions to Yudhisthira, the s :: Bhagavad G a, all episodes that elaborate some theme of devotion t to Visn u, Siva, or Krsn a (three such as examples are given from :: :: : the main story, including the killing of Sis up la), and several a highly polished expressions of Krsn a bhakti between 12.40 and :: : 12.56.17 Can such selective reading be successful? In defense of the practice of what I mostly call excavation, Fitzgerald upholds the practice in the name of three metaphor[s] of disconnection: excavation, analysis, [and] surgical excision.18 While analysis recalls the terms used a century ago by Edward Washburn Hopkins to distinguish his own approach from the synthetic approach he ascribed principally to Joseph Dahlmann, Fitzgerald supplies the third term himself, thereby giving us a hint that he is less the excavator than the textual surgeon: excavators dig beneath a text for what would be old; surgeons remove later growths, especially in this case bhakti appendages. Bhakti appendectomies on the Indian epics are an old and continuing practice and people have performed them for over a century of dierent reasons. But Fitzgeralds are distinctive and challenging. His main Mahbhrata centers a a on Dharmar ja Yudhisthira as a grim and somber extension of a :: his father Dharmar ja Yama, the god of death. This dark a Yudhisthira must preside over a divine raiding party of the gods :: that descends to earth to restore Brahmans to privileges denied them by the pro-Buddhist Mauryan emperor As oka these being the Brahmans who, according to Fitzgerald, would have composed the rst written main Mahbhrata out of rage at their treata a ment under As oka a deep and bitter political rage at the center

Many Voices ms., 10. See James L. Fitzgerald, The Position of Brahmins in the Mahbhrata: a a New Perspectives on the Development and Growth of the Epic Between the Empires, 3, Between the Empires Conference, University of Texas at Austin, April 2003. 18 Many Voices ms., 11 n. 36.
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of the Mahbhrata.19 Be it noted that Fitzgerald and I agree both a a on the approximate dates of the earliest Mbh and on its having been written, but we disagree over whether it was again overwritten with new material of two main types: instructional material on dharma and related matters that Yudhisthira hears about from :: Bhsma, and bhakti material; and of the latter, not only didactic : bhakti material like the G a and the Nryan t a a : ya, but narrative material within the main story. That it has been possible for the original versus late status of bhakti in the Mbh to remain so long unresolved is testimony to the insuciency of the arguments that have been raised on both sides of the question, my own in The Ritual of Battle included. And perhaps we are destined to remain stuck at this impasse forever. But Fitzgerald freshens the challenge and raises the stakes. Although I cannot address this topic as fully here as I hope to do in Mapping, above all because the exposition involves not only the Mbh but the Rmyana, Fitza a : geralds views point up the need to clarify the nature and importance of bhakti in these texts. For the Mbh, I would thus begin by going a few steps further than I do in Rethinking. Fitzgerald observes that in Rethinking I [o]nly occasionally. . . make observations (usually incidentally, often only in the notes) regarding the central importance for the MBh of such themes as Krsn a being the supreme God incarnate, bhakti, the four-yuga :: : theme, the avatra theme, the soteriological worldview of yoga, and a so on; but these asides serve to remind readers of those arguments of Hiltebeitel and Madeleine Biardeau that do depend on a rigorously synchronous reading of the text a characterization that, for reasons I will bring out later in this essay, I must reject. Nor for that matter is Biardeau rigorously synchronic, since for her the Nryan is late.20 On my a a : ya episodic treatment of bhakti in Rethinking, Fitzgerald adds in a footnote: For the most part these observations do not contribute anything new to those arguments.21 The point about footnotes,
See Fitzgerald, Making Yudhisthira the King, 85, thus attributing this :: rage to his rst group of epic-writing Brahmans as the motive behind their portrayal of his darker Yudhisthira (8590), a dark underside that I would certainly :: agree is there (see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 11920, 13539), but not prior to his larger portrayal as a thoughtful, virtuous man and endearing source of occasional light. 20 See Madeleine Biardeau, Le Mahbhrata: Un recit fondateur du brahmana a isme et son interpretation, 2 vols. (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2002), vol. 2, 566. 21 Fitzgerald, Many Voices ms., 1011 and n. 9.
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asides, and little new is engaging, and correctly calls attention to the fact that bhakti is not a direct subject of this book but rather a matter of my continuing emphasis. But considering that the only exception Fitzgerald cites to the charge of little new is my argument about a particular textual passage (Draupad call to Govinda s during her disrobing), it looks also to be a way of reassuring readers that the listed themes do not disturb any settled opinion that numerous if not most bhakti elements should be brought under the surgical knife.22 Yet Fitzgerald does not number among the bhakti matter that he peripheralizes an argument that is new, central to the book, and one that he nds to be [o]ne of [the books] interesting generalizations: A clear epic-long pattern is that while the deity and author [Krsn a and Vy sa] work together, the god deals primarily a :: : with Arjuna and the author with Yudhisthira.23 For me, the point :: has some value against arguments for the alleged lateness of the Bhagavad G a, as I maintain in my study of the Nryan t a a : ya. But more centrally, Rethinking does not focus on bhakti because it is concerned primarily with the relationship of Vy sa and Yudhisthira, not a :: with that between Krsn a and Arjuna, which is where bhakti in the :: : Mbh certainly gets its deepest articulations. With this in mind, let me say a bit about where I believe the argument for bhakti in the epics must go. To requote Fitzgerald, I believe that both epics Brahman poets provide [their] ideological and narrative grounding for a Brahminical conception of kingly rule and hierarchical society in bhakti,

John Brockington, who makes bhakti excisions in the practice of oral epic theory, says my treatment of this saree-restoration scene includes rather specious arguments against Edgertons text, referring to a page on which I say that Edgertons choice could merely typify the eagerness of the Critical Editions editors to excise bhakti by stripping the text (Rethinking, 251). But Brockington does not mention my arguments, much less show how they are specious; see his review of Rethinking, 602. Similarly, Mary Brockington fails to indicate why she attributes to me unfairness to Julius Lipner (p. 257 n. 49) in my summary of some of his arguments on this episode: see M. Brockington, review of Rethinking, Indo-Iranian Journal 45 (2002). The references are to Franklin Edgerton, ed., Sabhparvan. Ina troduction and Apparatus (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1944), from the Pune Critical Edition of the Mbh, and Julius Lipner, Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London and New York: Routledge, 1994). 23 Fitzgerald, Many Voices ms., 16, citing Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 90; cf. Many Voices ms., 16 n. 51.

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in bhakti itself, but that it is mapped dierently in the two epics. Whereas the Rmyana, which I regard to be the slightly later of the a a : two,24 grounds its politics of bhakti in a politics of kingship,25 the Mbh, to borrow a phrase, grounds its politics of bhakti in a politics of friendship26 or, more exactly, since it concerns not only Arjuna but Karn a, a politics of friendship and the enemy.27 I believe one : cannot have much of a main Mah bh rata or even, for that mata a ter, much of a dark Yudhisthira, whom Karn a dogs at every step :: : without it. It is thus here, over the relation between politics and bhakti, that Fitzgerald and I have our most central divergence, but also, I would like to believe, the chance for our most productive conversation. Finding me remiss in attending to the politics of the Mbh,
I am persuaded by Madeleine Biardeau here as regards the sequence of the two epics, though I believe the distance in time between them is less than she proposes; see Biardeau, Le Rmyana de Vlm (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), xxxv, li-lii; a a : a ki Le Mahbhrata, vol. 1, 701. a a 25 This was appreciated by Sheldon Pollock, who I believe nonetheless made the mistake of chronologically prioritizing the politics over the bhakti even though he admitted that no evidence supported it; see Pollock, trans., The Rmyana of a a : Vlm a ki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 3: Aranyaknd a, Robert P. Goldman, ed. a: : : (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 46, 52; Hiltebeitel, Epic Studies: Classical Hinduism in the Mahbhrata and the Rmyana, Annals of the Bhana a a a : darkar Oriental Research Institute 74 (1994), 3654; and idem, Indias Epics: Writing, Orality, and Divinity, in Arvind Sharma, ed., The Study of Hinduism (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 12324. 26 See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, George Collins trans. (London: Verso, 1997), repeatedly and provocatively applicable to the consideration of friendship not only in the Mbh but in early Buddhism. 27 This was a leading subject in my Mapping Bhakti in the Sanskrit Epics, presented at the 214th meeting of the American Oriental Society at San Diego, March 2004. Here I draw on an old interest: see Hiltebeitel, Ritual of Battle, 25466; Brothers, Friends, and Charioteers: Parallel Episodes in the Irish and Indian Epics, ed. Edgar C. Polom, Homage to Georges Dumezil: Journal of IndoEuropean Studies Monograph, No. 3 (1982): 85112; The Two Kr snas on One :: : Chariot: Upanisadic Imagery and Epic Mythology, History of Religions 24 : (1984): 126. As I hope to show in Mapping, friendship relates to a whole cluster of themes that can be tied together in and around Karna, while friendship in rela: tion to enmity is the epic ground of dvesa bhakti, devotion by hatred, for which : the above-mentioned Sis up whom Fitzgerald would like to excise from the ala Mbh is the most prominent Mbh example and, like Karna and Arjuna, a son of : one of Kr snas paternal aunts; see Georges Dumezil, Mythe et epopee, 2: Types :: : epiques indo-europeens: un heros, un sorcier, un roi (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1971), 63, 6566.
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Fitzgerald thinks I may have divert[ed] my gaze from Yudhishhira the king to his relations to Draupad his father Dharma, , :: and my sense that the MBh truly is about the incarnation of the Supreme God Krsn a V sudeva at a juncture of yugas, leaving a :: : these politically important themes [to] remain the concealed dark matter of this book.28 Here, I should like to bring their dark matter into greater political light. First, however, it is striking that Fitzgerald emphasizes the participation of the three Krsn as :: : a a Krsn a V sudeva, Draupad Krsn , and Krsn a Dvaip yana Vy sa a :: :a :: : :: : in the main Mahbhrata. It is this triad that presents the most a a explicit dark matter (krsna means dark or black) of the Mbh, ::: and it would seem that Fitzgerald would be obliged to explain their intervention without reference to bhakti, since such a color coding also applies to Arjuna, to R ma and Bharata in the Rmyana, and to a a a : other (albeit later) avat ra iconographies.29 Let it suce to suggest a that, at least in the Mbh, these three or more Kr sn as motivate the nar:: : ratives through areas of darkness in which divine and political power converge. Fitzgerald, however, treats these explicitly dark gures as holy agents of Brahmanism30 and, from what I can gather, as more or less metaphoric supports for the rst composing Brahmans more basic portrayal of the dark Yudhsthira, whom Fitzgerald nds, as :: noted, to be darker than the more idealistic Yudhisthira I sup:: posedly present (for I do also darken Yudhisthira in a new way31). :: Apparently Krsn a bhakti, once it overwrites the text, would not only :: : be a later but a lighter political theology overlaid upon this originally darker vision. For me, however, there is already in The Ritual of Battle, as there is in Rethinking, an argument that the epic manages

Many Voices ms., 7. See Hiltebeitel, Ritual of Battle, 60-76. 30 See James L. Fitzgerald, 1999 ms. of the article Mahbhrata, to appear in a a Gene Thursby and Sushil Mittal, eds., The Hindu World (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2004), 7: the P : d avas are aided by three dark, obscure, or an : secret (krs : a) holy agents whose true identities or interests are not publicly n :: known . . . [who are] representative of the worlds Vedic brahmins; idem, 17: while in hiding after the lacquer house episode, the P : d avas are aided by the an : mysterious (krs: a) agent of Brahmanism Vy asa. : :n 31 In proposing that what Fitzgerald now calls the divine raiding party theme is actually launched in the myth of the ve former Indras through the Vr atya associations that link Yudhisthira to Yama and the P : d avas altogether to Indra an : :: (Rethinking, 13538 and especially 237, n. 20).
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to hold a darker and more idealist Yudhisthira and its arguments :: with and about God together in a dark and richly satisfying tension. In any case, Fitzgerald nds that I do not say enough about the politics of the Brahmans who lie behind what I call the epics composing committee and its portrayal of Vy sa as author.32 Yet as I a have noted, he tends to dene the epic poets Brahman politics only in relation to contemporary kings,33 whereas I hold that they were capable of composing and disseminating the Mbh without major (i.e., Gupta, or any earlier) royal patronage. What I intend to argue further is that, if I am right, it makes the politics of these Brahmans all the more interesting. In brief, given that we agree that the Mbh is a post-As okan text and thus colored by experiences of Buddhism and the other heterodoxies,34 and assuming that we are dealing with arguments over ideas, is there a main Mahbhrata that a a is the projection of a deep and bitter political rage in which faith is mostly a matter of afterthoughts, or are the Mbh and Rmyana a a : both designed to sustain a sly and patient political theology that unfolds a new bhakti cosmology in which royal patronage and Brahman prestige nd new justications and meanings that are still nonetheless saturated with overtones of Veda? In Mapping, I hope to work further on the ways the two epic texts construct their Brahman authors in relation to Veda, comparing the ways that Vy sa and V lm gure in their own texts, para a ki ticularly in relation to other prominent Brahman sages or Rsis, :: most of them with Vedic associations, and to the heroines.35 Noticeable among the dierences, however, is this: whereas in the Rmyanas single frame story, V lm is virtually the sole Rsi a a : a ki :: other than in his brief exchange with N rada, in the Mbh, the three a frame stories relate Vy sa to a number of Rsis in whom I sought, a :: in Rethinking, to detect allusions to a composing committee.

Many Voices ms., 7: Hiltebeitel says more about these brahmins if not their politics. 33 Fitzgerald, Making Yudhisthira the King, 66, n. 10; 67; 79, n. 51; 85. :: 34 Rethinking, 163 and passim. Fitzgerald and I are closer here than this review would imply; see his Making Yudhisthira the King, 7883. :: 35 See Hiltebeitel, Authorial Paths Through the Two Sanskrit Epics, Via the Rmopkhyna, paper delivered at the 14th World Sanskrit Conference, Helsinki a a a Finland, July 2003.

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On this subject, Fitzgerald has his reservations.36 Yet it is one of the values of a challenging and learned discussion that criticism on such a point can inspire a new idea. Fitzgerald nds it dicult to imagine a committee of poets jointly inventing such a complex and ingenious connected narrative [as the Mbh] and at the same time allowing itself such loose joins. Everything we know about brahminic and old Indian textual traditions tells us that editors and compilers amalgamate texts and do not at all mind loose joins or having no join other than physical contiguity; but individual authors in the Sanskrit tradition when we have them: P n ini, Paa: tanjali, As vaghosa, K lid sa enforce exceptionally tight conneca a : tions in the texts they fashion.37 I nd, however, that this contrast between editors and compilers on the one hand and individual authors on the other opens another way to think about how the epic poets worked within these very parameters. As in so many things, their model would have been their image of Veda Veda as a multi-genre, multi-style, multi-authored and loosely-joined totality, from the R g Veda through the Vedic corpus which they imag_ ine their own Fifth Veda to extend and rejuvenate. But as to individual authors and a jointly inventing committee, these comments are based on an incomplete reading of my indications of how the committee would have worked. Individual authors would have written much as Fitzgerald says others have done, often enforc[ing] tight connections in the texts they fashion, such as Nala, Suka, and many other subtales. But the invention of the complex and ingenious connected narrative and provision for loose joins would have come from the person the Mahbhrata a a and I call the author. Since Fitzgerald gives some plausibility to
36

I wonder at Fitzgeralds statement that I apply a hermeneutic lever that is too powerful and easy to use (Many Voices ms., 18) as if interpolation and redaction theory were made of sterner stu. Fitzgerald makes an allied point that excavationist and surgical approaches are economical, and believes that I argue for joint authorship as an argument of convenience. There would, however, have to be a correlation between convenience and economy, and I disagree that imagining the authorial agents responsible for the epic to be separated in time and interest and location (Many Voices ms., 10) is the less convenient or more economical of the options. A lot hangs on that point, but so be it. Indeed, even while defending excavation theories, Fitzgerald grants that one of the reasons to suspect them is that it is intellectually easier. . . to take something apart than it is to nd the often subtle connections that hold it together (Many Voices ms., 11). 37 Many Voices ms., 11 (my italics).

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the idea of a committee, our dierences thus lie mainly in how we imagine such a committee could most likely have worked, especially in relation to the author. With regard to Vy sa, Fitzgerald makes it clear I could have a been more straightforward about some things, and have thought further about others. Fitzgerald takes issue with my construction of the ever-receding author Vy sa as a deeply knowing ca tion of authorship;38 likewise, with my reading of the MBh through the keyhole of the Suka story,39 ascribing such a read ing to my alleged a priori conviction that [the Suka] story must 40 aa be synchronous with the rest of the MBh. But in my Nryaya study, composed before seeing Fitzgeralds essay on my n : book, I argue that certain units in the Mbh suggest the wrapping up of the project: the Suka story being one of them. I thus have no such a priori conviction about it or any other segment being synchronous with the rest. Like the Nryan a a : ya, I think, uka story is late in the short sense I advocate for that the S term. Moreover, if my keyhole reading of the Suka story is emblematic of my approach, Fitzgerald does something much the same with his insightful reading of the articial, didactic parable of Tanu (Skinny) as what he calls an important key to the epic and a stroke of symbol-making genius in his article Making Yudhisthira the King.41 As the Mbh indicates right :: after the Suka story and the Nryan a a : ya, there are many doors to heaven;42 just so, there would be many keys and keyholes to this text. Since there is no point in my leaving matters obscure, let me, despite some inevitable regrets, go beyond the hints oered in Rethinking and underscore how I believe the composing committee, emblemized in the relations between the three frames, could have worked in relation to the author.

Many Voices ms., 15. Ibid. ms., 18. 40 Ibid. ms., 17. 41 Fitzgerald, Making Yudhisthira the King, 7576. I do not, however, follow :: Fitzgeralds assessment of how old and new senses of dharma found in the Tanu story reect the history of the Mbh. 42 12.342.9; 16; see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 20.
39

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Most straightforward is an indication in Rethinking that Fitzgerald overlooks: Somewhere in back of all this the author spent 3 years on this work perhaps, as Vaidya saw it, doing such splendid plot-laying as to rival Shakespeare.43 Regarding C.V. Vaidya, I highlight his ne evaluation44 of the splendid plotlaying of Vy sa, of which he says, It has often occurred to me that a if the story of the Mahabharata is not a historical one, it must indeed be the production of an imagination which is higher than a that of Shakespeare.45 Meanwhile, the reference to Vy sas three years is a hint from the Mbh itself, where it says, For 3 years the Muni Krsn a Dvaip yana always got up making this superb a :: : Mahbhrata story.46 Surely obscure, but just as surely it also a a means something. In Rethinking I was not willing to speculate beyond bringing it into relation to the splendid plot-laying lines laid out by C.V. Vaidya. But for me it is also a hint that, diachronically speaking, the text probably took somewhere between this 3 years and the couple of generations I propose for its production, and that the 3 years may be commemorated here as all that the person pseudonymized as Vy sa had to give to the plot-laying project. a If so, I think the passage may also hint that the spirit of this person would have lived on among the members of the working committee. And I would relate this to another of the epics possible indications: the hint that by making Vy sa a sadasya seated attendee at Jaa namejayas snake sacrice ve generations after he has fathered the fathers of the epics heroes, the poets give presence to the author at his works debut. For there, as a silent listener47 to the Mbh which he is said to have created and imparted as his entire thought to Vais amp yana and the four other disciples, including Suka, Vy sas a a

Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 169; cf. 17. My purpose in discussing Vaidyas work at some length was to look past his impossible chronologies to the truly generative insights of a largely forgotten scholar. I do not just criticize him (see J. Brockington, Review of Rethinking, 601). 45 Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 17, citing Chintaman Vinayak Vaidya, The Mahbha rata: A Criticism (Bombay: Bombay Book Depot and Delhi: Mehar Chand a Lachhman Das, [1905] 1966), 49. 46 Mbh 1.56.32; see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 169, n. 134. 47 Silent but for one revealing exception discussed in Hiltebeitel, The Nryaaa n ya: Ongoing Problems in Dating the Sanskrit Epics. :
44

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authorial presence is felt behind all three frames.48 But more than this, it is not just Vy sa who is there listening at the snake sacrice. a So is Suka.49 What to make of this one obscurity couched within another? It would have to be a problem for Fitzgerald, who limits his main Mahbhrata to material selected from the Vaia a s amp yana frame. It seems that he wants not to have to reckon with a this double father and son felt presence at this very narration and behind it. Fitzgerald is willing to grant that [p]arts of the story of Vy sa and Suka certainly do form a masterful ction of intergeneraa tional anxiety,50 but surely there is more to it than that. It is a masterful ction that relates a specically fatherson story to the composition and dissemination of the Mbh. And it does this by challenging the very limits of narrative and temporal logic, for not only must Vy sa survive six generations to be present at Vaia s amp yanas recital; the best explanation for Sukas being there is a that he would have to have returned from moksa! : Keeping these hints together, it was in the back of my mind when I wrote Rethinking that the composing committee, in presencing the author and his son so strikingly at the epics rst public telling, might have lingered not only on the memory of the authors 3-year contribution, but on this poignant tale about how his lost son was once among these disciples as a co-disciple. No doubt one can appreciate my hesitancy in spelling this out.51 But it was among my considerations in suggesting a limit of two generations: that such a span could include time either for a son to carry on the work of his father, or time for the work to have been carried on by, among others, the sons co-disciples who might have survived him and/or the father. Thus, in suggesting that the Suka story is probably, like the Nryan late in the short sense I advocate for that term, let me a a : ya, call attention to my suggestion52 that the Suka story should be conCf. Christopher Z. Minkowski, Janamejayas sattra and Ritual Structure, Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, 3 (1989), 405, as cited in Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 94. Indeed, there are dierences in the way these two presences are felt throughout the inner frame. The outer Ugras ravas-R s is of the Naimis a Forest :: : frame is felt as an overhearing of the inner frame as retold from afar, whereas the outermost Vy and disciples frame is felt literally and with immediacy by Suka asa and Vy asas listening and bodily presence at Janamejayas snake sacrice itself. 49 Mbh 1.48.7; see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 115 and n. 71; 284 and n. 16. 50 Many Voices ms., 18. 51 See what I set as my limits for such discussion in Rethinking, 317 and n. 131. 52 Ibid., 1920, 2829.
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sidered along with its sequel, the Nryan and the latters sequel a a : ya, the story that is informative about the many doors to heaven, and also about gleaners and the Naimisa Forest (Mbh 12.240-53) as : a three-part sequence that concludes the Moksadharma section of the : Sntiparvan. Indeed, I would now mention a principle that guided me a in this view of epic diachrony: that the manner in which portions of the text are wound up is a better indicator of relative lateness than the joint premise of interpolation and centuries-later redaction. Indeed, another sequence to which such winding up, or leaving for the end, applies, in my view, is the Mbhs last two short parvans, which come just after Vy sa makes the last of his epic appearances to a tell Arjuna what he should convey to Yudhisthira as to how the great :: story must end.53 In any case, I suggest that the interesting problems lie in the dynamic between the epics three frames, for it is there that the real Brahman authors. . . must have enjoyed creating. . . some complex image of themselves.54 In this dynamic, the author is not to be set aside and there is no periphery or perimeter of the text to allow for what Fitzgerald calls eventual authorship. This thoroughly imbricated author, who is cleverly presenced everywhere, even in his characters thoughts, is, like Krsn a, an authority one can:: : not go beyond in matters of dharma and bhakti, and the relation of dharma and bhakti to each other. It is thus only half the story to say that I impute transcendent-author themes to Vy sa.55 Similarly, a although I appreciate Fitzgeralds insight that I read. . . Vy sa as an a a analog of the absent Buddha,56 it misses the same point: that Vy sa is as much presenced as absenced. In other words, the author is part of the design of the text. But what is design? Fitzgerald writes, even while sounding dubious, that it could be fruitful to approach every aspect of the text as being, possibly, a contingent invention designed for some specic artistic purpose.57 Here, when Fitzgerald writes of design it is as an interpolationist, arguing that not all passages are designed with the same degree of artistic purpose and freedom58 for inclusion in the text.
53 54

Mbh 16.9; Rethinking, 8790. Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 101. 55 Fitzgerald, Many Voices ms., 3. 56 Many Voices ms., 16, recalling his earlier citation (9) of Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 158. 57 Many Voices ms., 5 (my italics). 58 Ibid.

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That is, he is assuming that both early and late redactors, and especially the latter, would design passages for an expanding Mbh that lies somewhat inchoate before them waiting for their improvements. For this he gives his analogy of a great cathedral with multiple architects contributing over time.59 As I indicate in my piece on Weighting Orality and Writing, I prefer a dierent image: that of the atelier, where one master artist inspires the contributory work of a school.60 The textual archetype unveiled by the Pune Critical Edition reveals a design behind the Mbh that could be and, I think it best to think, would be coeval with its rst imaginings, which are indeed what I think the epic calls the entire thought of Vy sa, and what I a have in mind in quoting C.V. Vaidyas attribution to Vy sa of such a splendid plot-laying as to rival Shakespeare. Individual passages would have been created for and within that design, which would have been blueprinted to accommodate material of the great variety we nd. One reason for regarding the archetypal design as this early is that it is gratuitous to go before or after the Critical Edition to account for individual passages in it. Another is that this design is understood, at least in its broad outlines, by V lm (or if one prea ki fers, by the Vlm Rmyana), which cannot be much later than the a ki a a : Mbh a point that needs of course to be developed beyond what can be said here.61 But if I am on the right track in bringing the Rmyana into this argument from design, another reason to favor it a a :
I myself am inclined to imagine the development of the Mahbhrata more a a along the lines of the gradual building, modication, and occasional refurbishment of a great cathedral, under the direction of dierent architects and master-builders at dierent points of time. I think the gradualist models of the epics development that have prevailed in Western scholarship are obviously more plausible than Hiltebeitels one-time symposium (Many Voices, 15). Obviously, however, is a word that merely appeals to a prevailing view. 60 See n. 14 above. Note that for such a text, there would be no clear line between authors and redactors; cf. Fitzgerald, Making Yudhisthira the King, :: 73, 86. 61 See Alf Hiltebeitel, Authorial Paths through the Two Sanskrit Epics, Via the Rmopkhyna, 14th World Sanskrit Conference, Helsinki, Finland, July a a a 2003. But some of the groundwork for the claim is indicated in Rethinking the Mahbhrata, 6, n. 27, citing Sheldon I. Pollock, trans., The Rmyana of Vlma a a a : a  An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 2: Ayodhyk : d a (Princeton: Princeton Univerki: a an: sity Press, 1986), 3842, and Madeleine Biardeau, Some Remarks on the Links between the Epics, the Pur : as and their Vedic Sources, in Gerhard Oberhaman mer, ed., Studies in Hinduism: Vedism and Hinduism (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1997), 77119.
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would be the logical priority of a bhakti politics of friendship over a bhakti politics of kingship. And another is the likelihood, mentioned a a r earlier, that the correspondences between the S rad -Kas m and Malay lam recensions, which include this design and with it the a Nryan are signicantly pre-Gupta.62 a a : ya, Finally, Fitzgeralds critique has led me recognize the need to be clearer regarding the stress I place on the use of poetic conventions that give life and body to the Mbhs design. In looking back at Rethinking, I was surprised to nd that one point I meant to be important was made only in a footnote: that literary conventions do not last forever.63 The point is now worth exploring further, and above the line. In discussing the epic poets use of conventions, I make four points that bear on their not lasting forever. I maintain, with regard to the conventions I concentrate on, that a primary source for these particular conventions was the poets Vedic background and their sense of Vedic images as enigmas.64 I argue that these conventions have to do with nuances of cosmology.65
62 Indeed, another is that rather than growing on trees, such designs are trees. I have in mind here Frits Staals discussion of trees as designs within Vedic ritual; see his Ritual and Mantras: Rules without Meaning (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, [1990] 1996, 1058), and wish to imply that the epics design has these ritual designs as a familiar model. Although the discussion is of embeddedness (Staal, ibid.) rather than specically of trees, the point is anticipated by Christopher Z. Minkowski, Janamejayas sattra and Ritual Structure, Journal of the American Oriental Society 109,3 (1989): 40120 and his Snakes, sattras and the Mahbhrata, in a a Arvind Sharma, ed., Essays on the Mahbhrata (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), 384 a a 400; by Michael Witzel, JB paulp lan The Structure of a Br u : ahmana Tale, in M. : D. Balasubrahmaniam, ed., Dr. B.R. Sharma Felicitation Volume (Tirupati: Kendriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetha, 1986), 189216; and, with acknowledgment to both them and Staal, in Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 9394 and nn. 9 and 10. 63 Rethinking, 29, n. 120. I use the phrase in debating the views of Tamar Chana Reich, A Battleeld of a Text: Inner Textual Interpretation in the Sanskrit Mah arata, Ph.D. dissertation, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998: abh Granted we know the Mbh as a text that grew, and became what it is by expansion (with italics), but not that it took eight centuries of textual production.. . . Reich [thinks the Mbh develops through] eight-hundred year[s]. . . of contestatory discourse governed by an aesthetic of expansion (citing Reich 51, 32, and 31 successively). This aesthetic better bets a short period of controlled, consensual contestation, and also shared conventions, which do not last forever indeed, my note goes on to show that Reich sometimes points in this direction. It is in any case the rst thing I say in the book about conventions (353 [Index]). 64 Rethinking, 40 and n. 28. 65 A matter of major importance too often disregarded.

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And I contend that while their empire of conventions . . . would grow in proportion to the representative ambition of authors from the epics through the pur n as,66 once outside the web of meanings a: sustained within the Mbh, these specic conventions either no longer retained the same range or precision when used by V lm 67 a ki or in the pur n as,68 or else took on new precisions. One could infer a: that the politics of these conventions would lie in their Vedic ambitions, and their bhakti in the cosmological nuances. While Rethinking takes preliminary note of a variety of conventional usages that roughly t the four traits of Vedic background, cosmological nuance, literary novelty, and textual specicity, the four points bear most directly on three particular conventions: usages of antara or interval; of nimisa/nimesa or : : moment; and of prstha as back in the context of the backs ::: of mountains and the phrase nkaprstha, back of the rmaa ::: ment. Fitzgerald seems to have no diculty with the rst,69 which, as others have noted, relates to well-attested parallels between ritual and narrative embeddedness that have helped us unpack the epics frame stories, including the Vais amp yana a frame that Fitzgerald is willing to keep in a truncated way. As to the second, he puzzles over it and pulls together many passages, mainly in a footnote,70 outlining what I have said, and placing it among things he nds not central to his argument, perhaps because to discuss a convention that ties in with the Naimisa Forest the site of the epics outer frame takes him outside : the Vais amp yana inner frame that he partially accepts. a Fitzgerald does, however, take issue with my translation of prstha by back. He makes several points: with regard to moun:::

Ibid., citing Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1985), Vol. 2, 13. 67 See ibid., 124 and 285, on V kis likely but very limited adoption of the alm naimisa convention (R 7.82.13, with vana rather than aranya: see Fitzgerald, am : : Many Voices ms., 8 n. 30) in connection with his minimal but probably knowing placement of R amas As vamedha at Naimis a Forest, making it the place : where R ama hears his sons recite the Rmyana. a a : 68 See ibid., 156 on an extended meaning of the Naimis a Forest in the : Brahm : d a Pur : a; 28286 on epic and pur : ic treatments of Suka. a n: an an 69 See Many Voices ms., 8. 70 Many Voices ms., 8 and n. 30.

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tains, that their prominent topsides, upper ridges, or peaks. . . is the usual usage in the MBh; that this so-called usual usage seems to work ne in the Suka episode; and that while [s]tandalone adverbial uses of prstha refer to the rear or backside of a person ::: or thing, uses of prstha as the nal member of a tatpurusa com::: : pound. . . seem consistently to refer to the upper sides of animals (elephants, horses, tortoises) or the upper side of the rmament (the nkaprstha), or the upper ridges and peaks of mountains.71 a ::: But here is an example from Rethinking itself that disproves the argument for consistency of the usual usage.72 Once Yudhisthira :: agrees to perform a horse sacrice as purication after the great war, Vy sa tells him where to nd the riches on Mount Munjavat, a a big golden base or foothill ( pda) that one approaches on a the way to Mount Meru from the north side of Mount Himavat and on the back of Mount Himavat (girer himavatah prsthe) : ::: where Siva performs tapas in the company of Um and their hosts a (8.13). No ordinary mountain, Munjavat glows like gold on all sides with the same radiance as the morning sun, and cannot be seen by the living with their natural eshy eyes ( prkrtair mm saa : a: locanaih ; 710).73 It would be hard to imagine Mount Munjavat on : the top of Mount Himavat, and I believe it is safe to say that even Indian cosmology is yet to do so. Moreover, the passage is explicit that it is to the north of Himavat, and thus in back of it from Yudhisthira and Vy sas current location. Indeed, Munjavat is distinct a :: here from both Himavat and Meru as a base or foothill and cannot be regarded as an upper ridge of either the grand range or the cosmic mountain.74 Another pertinent usage of prstha as : :: back describes where the Sarasvat River disappears into the
71 72

Many Voices ms., 17 n. 57. The usage is with a genitive rather than in a tatpurus a, but that only shows : that the meaning would be pertinent, too, to a tatpurus a. : 73 Rethinking, 74, with a correction from himavath to himavatah ; cf. 77, where : : the point about the back of the mountain is restated. 74 Proposing that Mt. M javat, the earlier spelling of this mountain as one of u great Vedic import as the source of soma, be identied as Muztagh Ata, (Uighur) Father of Muz Mountain(s), a giant mountain towering over a mountain complex on the border of Tajikistan and Xinjiang, close to the source of the Oxus and Yarkand-Tarim rivers, see Frits Staal, Three Mountains and Seven Rivers, forthcoming in Shoun Hino and Toshihiro Wada, eds., Indian Culture and Buddhism: Felicitation Volume for Professor Musashi Tachikawa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), manuscript courtesy of the author, p. 2.

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back of the desert (marup : sthe) (3.80.118) that is, certainly not r: : the deserts top or upper ridges. Other examples could be cited in favor of the translation back, or in some cases, as Fitzgerald allows, upper ridges, so long as one recognizes the implication of a certain other-sidedness, out-of-sightness, and hiddenness, often associated with caves.75 The meaning back is a literal bodily meaning susceptible I would say, irresistibly to metaphoric uses,76 and hardly reducible to such a bland meaning as top of the mountain, for which Sanskrit has so many other words. In fact, Michael Witzel translates a Vedic usage of nkasyaprstht as du a ::: a dos du rmament.77 Back is a meaning that is consistent and powerful for mountains, the rmament, and the desert, and repeat edly pertinent to the Suka story. Indeed, the cosmological signicance of the back of the mountain makes for a certain equivalence, when the mountain is Himavat, to the back of the rmament, since what is in back of Himavat is the cosmic mountain Meru, around which the heavens move.78 No, as the poets show us in the case of Munjavat, the back of the mountain is a metaphoric goldmine. But I am hardly arguing that this mother-loded convention supplies the only mean-

Other passages pertinent to this sense are 3.155.16cd and 157, in which the back of Himavat is wooded and a place for hunting; 5.11.8, 9.47.41, and 12.160.31, each as a setting for narratives related to celestial movements (Seven Rs is, Nahus a) on the back of Himavat; and 3.266.1-2 and 21, where the :: : Rmopkhyna describes R a a a ama and Laksmanas residence on Mount M alyavat : : during the rainy season away from Kis kindh cf. R 4.27.1 and 46.10 using a; am : prs: ha for their mountain cave (giriguha) rainy season residence (4.25.24) near : :t lakes and cranes, while s : parvatasygre at 4.29.5 should probably be a nah a seated on that foremost mountain rather than seated on the mountaintop, as per Rosalind Lefeber, trans., The Rmyana of Vlm a a : a ki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 4: Kiskindhk : d a (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 118. a a n: : 76 On body metaphors, see George Lako and Mark Turner, More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 77 Michael Witzel, Sur le chemin du ciel, Bulletin des etudes indiennes 2 (1984): 219, citing Satapatha Brhmana 9.2.3.26; see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the a : Mahbhrata, 147, n. 61. a a 78 See Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 150, 309.

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ing. I am arguing for slesa: double and indeed multiple meaning: : that is, polysemy.79 I believe that Fitzgeralds concern as a translator makes him justly cautious. He wants to bring out baseline readings for ordinary English-speaking readers. This is usually (I regard the present case to be an exception) a good guideline for a translation that does not want to encumber itself with any more footnotes or introductory caveats than it has to. But it is not a sucient guideline for Mbh interpretation. Beyond treating these three particular conventions in Rethinking, I agged some others in passing.80 For this essay, one of these has been worth exploring further, for as a case of textual specicity that takes on new precisions after the Mbh, it shows the epic poets displaying literary novelty and cosmological nuance in beginning to give play to what will become the signature concept of the politics of bhakti: avat ra. The text that a most prominently links the two epics, the Rmopkhyna (the a a a Mbhs chief account of the R ma story), provides the most strika ing single piece of evidence. There, at the decisive moment of R mas conception, Brahm tells the gods and Rsis how R van a a a a : :: will be killed: For that purpose the four-armed Visn u has des:: cended (avat : o . . . vis nuh ) at my command81 upon which rn :: : Brahm ; goes on to command the hosts of gods to take birth a

On slesa in Suka, see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking the Mahbhrata, 306, where a a : these comments apply also to Fitzgeralds advocacy (Many Voices, 17, n. 58) of a straightforward translation of the marvel of the mountains in the Suka story as a sucient reading. See similarly J. Brockington, Review of Rethinking the Mahbhrata, 601-2, on the phrase artham vicintayan in this story which suggests a a : both pondering the meaning and (as I was certainly aware) keeping in mind his purpose, but not no more than the latter. 80 E.g., telling a story before it happens (Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 285 86), and usages of muhrtam, hour, as a kind of indeterminate time-passer, an u awhile or meanwhile (72, 74, 300). One could also speak of a doors convention (see, to begin with, n. 42 above) and a path convention in connection with the way each epic traces a path linking the author and the heroine through the narratives, and most centrally through the forest books; see Hiltebeitel, Authorial Paths through the Two Sanskrit Epics, Via the Rmopkhyna, cited above. The path idea is mentioned in Rethinking, 112, a a a n. 64. 81 3.260.5: tad artham avat : o sau mat niyogc caturbhujah /vis : uh . rn a : :n :
79

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on earth as Visnus companions (vis noh sahyn) (260.6-7).82 a a :: :: : Another intriguing usage of ava-tr ; occurs in descriptions of divinely : incarnated heroes descending to Kuruksetra, which is, after all, : not only the battleeld where they resolve the political action of the Mahbhrata but the high altar (utaravedi) of Praj pati (Mbh a a a 9.52.20) to which descend the Vedic gods in sacrice. I cited two such instances in Rethinking one describing the P n davas and a: : Krsn a (12.48.3) and the other Balar ma (9.53.33) descending to a :: : Kuruksetra.83 I now nd four additional instances of descending : to Kuruksetra: one describing the P n davas and Somakas (avat a: : rya : kuruksetram; 6.1.3); one for V sudeva, his horses, and charioteer a : (kuruksetram; avtaran; 12.53.23); one for Yudhisthira, having rst a : :: crossed over utt rya the purifying Yamun (kuruksetram avtarat; a a : 15.30.16); and one for Arjuna, accompanying the remaining Vrsi :: women after the death of Krsn a (kuruksetram; avtarat; 16.8.65). To a :: : : be sure, such uses might be cautiously translated by reached or crossed, but their frequency and the particular descending subjects all linked with the P n dava side and/or the entourage of a: :

The same term used by Vais amp ayana in the Rmopkhynas frame story a a a to describe the monkeys, bears, P : d avas, and allies of Indra (276.5-10 four an : times). On these passages, see Hiltebeitel, Authorial Paths. Not surprisingly (see n. 22 above), J. Brockington sees these verses as an interpolation; see J. Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics, Handbuch der Orientalistik, Zweite Abteilung, Indien, Vol. 12, J. Bronkhorst, ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1998), 476. Considering the Rmopkyna as subsequent to the Rmyana (a matter I cannot take up here, a a a a a : but on which I do not agree), Brockington takes these Rmopkhyna /Mbh verses a a a as indicative of growth subsequent to the Rmyanas second stage, arguing that a a : they are [t]he sole exception to R ama being mainly a human and exemplary gure, the position reached in the middle of the second stage of growth of the R ayana. He nds it the more signicant that the Rmopkhyna does not am : a a a allude to R amas divinity in its closing chapter. But it is hard not to read Brahm closing words there as just such an allusion: Like an immortal, you as have accomplished a great feat of the gods (krtam tvay mahatkryam devnm a a a a : : : amaraprabha) (3.275.34cd). In any case, it is in the same adhy aya that R ama is soon consecrated the vaisnava hero (65). For similar comments (the only :: exception), see also J. Brockington, Epic Threads: John Brockington on the Sanskrit Epics, Greg Bailey and Mary Brockington, eds. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 300. 83 Rethinking, 70 n. 35, 146, 232 n. 36: the rst with the simple phrase avat rya kuruksetram; the second using avat rya in the context of making that descent. I : also noted a verse describing Vy asas disciples descending to earth (12.315.8); Rethinking, 295.

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Krsn a; none linked with the Kaurava side suggest something :: : more: that they are describing, in Fitzgeralds terms, the divine raiding party of the gods. Against this emerging background, I also drew in the instance of V rsn eya, the charioteer of Nala with this a :: name of Krsn a (Krsn a is called V rsn eya as a member of the Vr sn i a :: :: : :: : :: : clan) who, in superuously descending from Nalas chariot (avat rya vrs neyo), doubles for Krsn a himself 84 the charioteer Krsn a who a :: :: : :: : will daily ascend and descend from his friend Arjunas chariot while crafting the bhakti politics of the Mbh war. I would now submit that this is cumulative evidence for what I would call a descent convention that uses derivatives of the verb ava-tr before the noun avatra a : becomes the favored pur n ic term for cosmic divine descent. a: Because it comes from a Mahbhrata connoisseur, Fitzgera a alds carefully considered challenge to continue rethinking the Mbh toward clarication of its politics of bhakti is a stimulating one to attempt to carry forward. Yet even if we are not reaching agreement on these matters, it is important to underscore a hardly surprising but still gratifying point on which we do agree, which Fitzgerald often remarks on: that he and I mostly disagree over points about which either of us could be right. Another is that the Mbh is a work of many voices. Fitzgerald and I are each Mbh pluralists, and are each challenged by what that would best mean in engaging this text. A photo taken at the 2003 Between the Empires Conference at Austin, Texas, catches the two of us scratching our heads together over the Mbh. That is something we have done for years, as have many others. The appreciation of many voices thus applies as well to the international and interdisciplinary project of ongoing Mbh rethinking,

84 The superuity arises from the fact that this double of Kr sna never has to ::: take the reins, since Nala is driving; see Hiltebeitel, Rethinking, 23233. As mentioned in n. 7 above, J. Brockington nds this implausible. For valuable discussion of the avat ara theme in both epics, and especially in the Rmyana, see a a : also Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland, trans. The Rmyana of Vlm a a : a ki, Vol. 5: Sundarakyanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 2933, 69, a :: 73.

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which to my mind does its work best when it starts from Mbh appreciation. Department of Religion The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052 USA E-mail: beitel@gwu.edu